As I have already said, there is a lunatic fringe to every reform movement.  At least nine-tenths of all the sincere reformers supported me; but the ultra-pacifists, the so-called anti-imperialists, or anti-militarists, or peace-at-any-price men, preferred Croker to me; and another knot of extremists who had at first ardently insisted that I must be “forced” on Platt, as soon as Platt supported me themselves opposed me because he supported me.  After election John Hay wrote me as follows:  “While you are Governor, I believe the party can be made solid as never before.  You have already shown that a man may be absolutely honest and yet practical; a reformer by instinct and a wise politician; brave, bold, and uncompromising, and yet not a wild ass of the desert.  The exhibition made by the professional independents in voting against you for no reason on earth except that somebody else was voting for you, is a lesson that is worth its cost.”

At that time boss rule was at its very zenith.  Mr. Bryan’s candidacy in 1896 on a free silver platform had threatened such frightful business disaster as to make the business men, the wage-workers, and the professional classes generally, turn eagerly to the Republican party.  East of the Mississippi the Republican vote for Mr. McKinley was larger by far than it had been for Abraham Lincoln in the days when the life of the Nation was at stake.  Mr. Bryan championed many sorely needed reforms in the interest of the plain people; but many of his platform proposals, economic and otherwise, were of such a character that to have put them into practice would have meant to plunge all our people into conditions far worse than any of those for which he sought a remedy.  The free silver advocates included sincere and upright men who were able to make a strong case for their position; but with them and dominating them were all the believers in the complete or partial repudiation of National, State, and private debts; and not only the business men but the workingmen grew to feel that under these circumstances too heavy a price could not be paid to avert the Democratic triumph.  The fear of Mr. Bryan threw almost all the leading men of all classes into the arms of whoever opposed him.

The Republican bosses, who were already very powerful, and who were already in fairly close alliance with the privileged interests, now found everything working to their advantage.  Good and high-minded men of conservative temperament in their panic played into the hands of the ultra-reactionaries of business and politics.  The alliance between the two kinds of privilege, political and financial, was closely cemented; and wherever there was any attempt to break it up, the cry was at once raised that this merely represented another phase of the assault on National honesty and individual and mercantile integrity.  As so often happens, the excesses and threats of an unwise and extreme radicalism had resulted in immensely strengthening the position of the beneficiaries of reaction.  This was the era when the Standard Oil Company achieved a mastery of Pennsylvania politics so far-reaching and so corrupt that it is difficult to describe it without seeming to exaggerate.